


a hand to hold

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Challenge Response, F/M, Getting Together, Holding Hands, Inspired By Tumblr, Introspection, Prompt Fill, Rogue One - some of them live, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 07:50:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9874286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Jyn thinks that maybe now she has a better grasp of her heart, on her feelings -- but also maybe now it's too late to tell Cassian what she wants.Is it?





	

Every step she took sent icy shocks blasting up from her feet despite the thick boots and the thick socks, and she cursed the place where she and Cassian had been holed up for the last few weeks. Cursed the weather and cursed the beings on whom they were supposed to be gathering intelligence -– but those beings were being skittish, were being secretive, and so the daily scouting forays ended in empty-handed futility and the fruitless grinding of teeth. Sometimes it was her and sometimes it was Cassian. Days passing by with piles upon piles of nothing to show for it.

And now Jyn’s shoulder had almost completely healed. Now Cassian could walk almost without stumbling. Weeks on end of forced inactivity; days of slow-paced sneaking through the marketplaces and huddled houses of this hamlet on a wind-blasted plateau on a planet with a name that was very difficult to pronounce in Basic. Nights of clear cold skies and yet very few stars, because of the nine moons that were strung from horizon to horizon. 

Dry-baked days and frost-dark nights.

She peered out of the window and cursed, once again, as her breaths upon the transparent material condensed into delicately spiking patterns of rime. It would have been pretty except that the nights were so long and so punishingly cold, and it was all they could see for hours on end, before the tiny yellow disc of the planet’s faraway sun struggled over the horizon once again to begin a new daylight cycle.

Jyn stomped her feet, blew onto her chilled fingertips, shivered and swore and finally forced herself to climb back into her bunk. A tiny blocky little heating machine warmed her cheek and her ear and not much of anything else. She’d give anything for a change of pace. A proper immersion in water, she thought, or even a fall of warm rain like she used to taste on her tongue and on her teeth while she was growing up in tall green grass and the irregular fields that her mother and father watched over with too-anxious eyes. The crunch of fresh fruits. The muggy rain-washed scent of the Yavin 4 jungle. She’d even put up with the too-sharp too-knowing needling coming from Leia and from Shara; with the too-earnest exhortations coming from Baze and Chirrut.

Hell, if only Kaytoo were here -– at least she’d be entertained.

She tossed restlessly on the bed and cursed the temperatures once again. Cursed Cassian -– no, not him really. She cursed the absence of him. Why wasn’t he here? Where had he gone now? Not that she could still say that she could have some kind of claim on him. The hot days baked her thoughts into dry dust, and the cold nights froze them into silence, and every day that she said nothing seemed to be another day in which he might be losing interest in her.

She’d seen that, at least, in the way his eyes had searched her face in the frantic waiting breathless hours after Scarif and before the destruction of the Death Star: the two of them marooned in the medcenter, dunked into bacta and swathed in bandages and bedclothes, and theirs had been the most grievous of the injuries that had been sustained -– at least compared to everyone else who had survived. She’d almost died, and she knew that much from Bodhi’s worried whispers. Cassian had nearly died, Baze had bluntly stated. 

And Cassian had been awake before her, and seemed to have been waiting for her to wake. She’d seen the movement of his hand on the sheet, movement in the direction of her cot, though she also thought that it was just a dream. 

But she’d turned her back on him. She’d tried to run. She couldn’t untangle her feelings from the fierce choking rush of coming back to life, from the strange sweet sharpness of saving Cassian’s life and being saved by him in turn. She’d tried to go away to find her own heart, the same heart that he might have been asking for in that strangled smile that had been the first thing she’d seen after the blinding light of the Death Star. Run on missions all over the galaxy, and come back to his kind eyes every time, and still she’d turned away, afraid and wanting.

And now she thought it might be too late: she’d nearly been killed slowly and painfully, tortured into a wreck of bones and battered skin by beings who were even more brutal than the Empire, and he had come to save her again. Had been bashed into a bloody pulp for his troubles. But he’d managed to get them onto a ship and now they were here: out on a mission, to be sure, but with enough time for the wounds to knit back together.

But it had now been nearly a year since nearly falling on the sands of Scarif.

She cursed herself, softly, and thought that it was too late.

“It’s not.”

Jyn blinked.

Tried to move, tried to turn, tried to -– she couldn’t move.

Not because of pain or cold. Not because of regrets and the dead cold ashes of could-have-been.

She couldn’t move, because she was being held in place, because someone was holding her hand.

Someone who was actually Cassian Andor.

His palm against hers was rough and dry and crisscrossed with scars, and she never wanted him to let go. She let her fingers curl carefully around his, as though to try out the motion and then quickly take it back -– except that he let out a small soft sound that nearly made her think of contentment and then she looked up at him, and would have fallen over, had she not already been lying down.

Because he was bowed low under the weight of his years, the weight of his own personal war, and yet he could smile. Was smiling at her like she was something important.

“Not precious,” she heard herself say. “Don’t think me some kind of idol.”

He laughed, gently, and she wanted so badly to laugh with him.

“You are no idol and I know that very well,” was what he said, however. “You are complicated. You are infuriating. You are stubborn. You are kind. You are headstrong. Shall I go on? Because there’s nothing about being perfect, not on that list. Just -– it’s just you. I think. I want to know more, if it’s still possible.”

Jyn thought for a moment.

Folded both of her hands around that one of his. “So it’s not too late yet?” she asked, afraid of the answer. Wanting to make a list of her own. A list that was him, that was all of him.

But he shook his head. “No. Not too late. And -– not in a hurry, either. Not just because of this mission which may never end. Whatever pace you’re comfortable with.”

She blinked. “And you? Your pace?”

“We can talk about it,” he allowed. “My pace and yours. Until we can share it. Or agree to change it, together.”

She tasted that word on her tongue: that impossible word. “Together.”

There were snowflakes in Cassian’s hair, in his eyelashes.

She smiled back at him, and pulled, gently, on his hand. His hand, warming, in both of hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week One: "a hand to hold" at [@rebelcaptainprompts](http://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr.
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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